CURSE OF THE NIMBIES

Compare and contrast these two statements:

A: "The huge turbines would be grotesque alien features. The applicant is a large, powerful, multi-national company with massive resources. We are a small village. We are looking to you for protection. We need your help ... We are relieved we got the decision and we are very grateful to the councillors. Of course, we know this isn't over. We fully expect Scottish Power Renewables to appeal. It has the budget and no reason not to appeal. We are already planning the next stage of the campaign."

B: "Today's planning committee decision to reject the wind-farm application is the right one. Large wind turbines should be more than two kilometres from homes and preferably offshore. We are aware that this may not be the end of resident's plight. The applicant is a large corporation with substantial parent company financial backing. They have the funds to force an appeal. We will fight on."

Those two statements were published within a day of each other, one locally, the other in the East Midlands. It seems that all anti-windfarm nimby groups sound the same.

Witness the special pleading, the "we're so tiny and they're so huge" whining, the claims that wind energy companies will only pursue an appeal because they have the finances to do so - not because they're looking to ensure that the UK still has an electricity supply in a few years' time. The boringly familiar notion that all country dwellers live in a uniquely pretty, unspoilt landscape, which must be protected (i.e., reserved for wealthy home-owners) at all costs. The phoney David-vs-Goliath stance, the silly guff about windfarms being permissible as long as the nimbies can't see them, the universal nimby agreement that local councillors voting against the national interest are doing the right thing.

Looked at in this light - the generic anti-everything nimby approach, which sounds amazingly similar wherever it is encountered - the picture begins to alter. Suddenly, it's not a gross, overcapitalised multinational standing over isolated communities, but a co-ordinated nimby movement opposing progress, regardless of the harm done to the nation. The David-vs-Goliath argument can only stand up where it is one tiny hamlet fighting something awful (like a nuclear power station) against overwhelming odds. Where it's every village in Middle England relying on the same hideous tactics of lies, bullying, gerrymandering and playground-style peer pressure, then something else is going on.

What that might be was amply illustrated by a strange piece in The Guardian, which also came out at the same time as the identikit nimby moans printed above. Alexander Chancellor is very pleased that the Government awarded his family two massive grants to renovate the ancestral piles and their extensive grounds (a strange kind of socialism of which, it would seem, Chancellor wholeheartedly approves). But now the 'view' from his 17th-century pavillions is 'threatened' by a proposed windfarm. Now, obviously that cannot be allowed to happen. Tax-payers' money spent on tarting up aristocratic mansions is fine, of course, but coordinating a forward-looking, clean, green and effective response to the twin issues of climate change and energy security - no, never!!! Not if it affects the view!

As usual, the countryside around Chancellor's publicly-paid for properties is "unspoiled". In reality, there is no countryside in the UK that counts as "unspoiled", as anybody with a grasp of history would know. But, like all the other areas bristling with nimby obstructionism, his part of South Northants is that mythical realm of unspoiledness in which unicorns prance about and golden bunnies frolic under permanent rainbows.

It's the same special pleading, backed up by the same nimby myths and misleading codswallop (Chancellor falls back on that same bilge about poisonous lakes in China that was revealed as way off the mark in our last post). All in all, it's the same old Toryism, frantically seeking to preserve its privileges ("unspoilt views") against the pressing need for practicable solutions to very real problems.

In France, they do things differently. Sarkozy recognised a few years ago that his country's reliance on nuclear energy (which is far from renewable, being dependent on diminishing fossil fuel resources) was a case of too many eggs in one basket - besides which, rising global temperatures meant that, on occasion, France's entire nuclear fleet has to be switched off for safety reasons. So a massive investment in wind energy got underway - and it continues (in spite of what certain Conservative politicians would have us believe).

Over there, they just install windfarms. La Belle France seems to welcome them, the locals throwing parties whenever a new windfarm starts operating. And so, once again, our nearest neighbours and eternal rivals march ahead, while we allow ourselves to get mired in endless planning disputes, thwarted by nimby groups who make up crazy stories just so that their views don't get spoilt.

Makes you proud to be British, really, doesn't it?